'Motivation': Suns forward Jae Crowder addresses negative chants from Pelicans' fans entering Game 6

NEW ORLEANS — Jae Crowder should expect the New Orleans Pelicans fans to chant his name even louder for Thursday night's Game 6 — and not in a good way.

During Sunday's Game 4 loss at Smoothie King Center, a very large percentage of the sellout crowd of 18,962 repeatedly shouted ''F Jae Crowder'' (though using the full four-letter word).

Crowder said the chants serve as "motivation" for him.

"It's tough to block out 20,000 people, but you let it fuel you," Crowder said after Wednesday's practice. "It's motivation. Obviously, you're on the road. You know what you're coming into, but I know who to lean on, and that's my teammates. Whenever things get hard, we talk about leaning on one another and being there for one another and I think when you go on the road and you go into a hostile environment, you try to lean on those guys, but you use all that stuff as motivation, and give you more purpose to play the game with the team, with the crowd into it."

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Crowder was a target of Lakers fans during last year's first round.

The Suns forward did the salsa dance in mimicking LeBron James' Mountain Dew commercial late in Game 6, which the Suns won to close out the playoff series.

"A player like me, I feed off it," Crowder said. "I like it, I enjoy it. I embrace it. I just try to use it as motivation."

Chris Paul heard the same expletive chants aimed at him late in last week's Game 3 win in New Orleans.

"These my people, man," said Paul, who played his first six NBA seasons in New Orleans. "What you talking about? I grew up here. Six of the best years of my life I played for New Orleans and you can't base a select number of people on an entire group."

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New Orleans drafted Paul fourth overall out of Wake Forest in 2005.

"I know how I am with this city," Paul continued. "That'll never change. I have my parents here. My family here. It's nothing like it. It'll always be so much love between me and this city. I don't ever pay that any mind."

After Game 3, Suns coach Monty Williams defended the place he began his NBA head coaching career in 2010.

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"This city is not about that," Williams said. "I would say whoever did that, it's probably a small, small minority. This city has always been good to Chris and those kind of chants aren't indicative of the people of this city. I don't know who did that. I really don't care. I know that the majority of the people in this city respect Chris and what he's been able to do in this city for families and kids speaks for itself. That kind of stuff, you don't even want to speak to it because it's certainly not a commentary on the people of this city."

Crowder said he doesn't understand why the Pelicans fans are targeting him now.

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"My teammates know how I'm geared and how I feed off energy and how I feed off energy in the building," Crowder said. "I feed off home crowd, away crowd. I feed off of that. so I embrace it, but I don't take it too personally. I take it as a compliment. Like friendly competition."

Still, Crowder said he isn't planning to walk the streets of New Orleans anytime soon.

"I just take it for what it is," he said. "Just try to stay in my hotel room. Stay out the way cause I don't want to deal with that."

Crowder said he's had to shield his 8-year-old daughter from the negativity.

"She doesn't understand that," Crowder said. "She hears it on TV and she asks me questions after the game. I just try to keep it as friendly as possible for her. Just make a joke, make light of it, but at the same time, she doesn't understand. When she was here, I didn't want to walk the streets with her because I didn't want her to hear any bad gestures or sayings towards me. I just stay in my little area and stay in my room and just focus on one game at a time."

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Have opinion about current state of the Suns? Reach Suns Insider Duane Rankin at dmrankin@gannett.com or contact him at 480-787-1240. Follow him on Twitter at @DuaneRankin.

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This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Crowder addresses negative Pelicans chants entering Game 6 in New Orleans